Stability indices for constrained self-adjoint operators (Q2880646)

The authors present the state of the art in stability theory of nonlinear waves in Hamiltonian dynamical systems. This subject has received much attention in the past years, as the references show. The main goal of this article is to supply simplified proofs of the key stability theorems which were proven recently with alternative tools.NEWLINENEWLINENEWLINEIt is well understood for nonlinear waves in Hamiltonian systems that the unstable eigenvalues of the spectral stability problem are related to the spectrum of the second variation of the Hamiltonian evaluated at the nonlinear wave. The second variation has to be constrained on a closed subspace of the underlying Hilbert space. The authors present a new proof of the negative eigenvalue count for such constrained, self-adjoint operators, and extend the result to include an analysis of the location of the point spectra of the constrained operator relative to that of the unconstrained operator. The results are applied to provide a new proof of the instability index theory for a generalized eigenvalue problem via a careful analysis of the associated Krein matrix.